After playing VO for a while I came to find that there aren't many opportunities to fight live players in multi-ship engagments. This is primarily because most players are members of guilds who have non agression pacts with each other. Thus I created a new alt and discovered the promise of piracy. Most guilds are sworn enemies of pirates. This opened a new season of excellent furballs with skilled pilots from many guilds. I think pirating provides a unique opproturnity to bring pilots into furballs. For this reason I am suggesting some changes which might encourage others to create pirate alts.

Part of the fun of creating an alt is using the skill and insight you have already acquired to advance the new chatacter. Botting is boring. PVP kills now provide only combat xp. Let's allow a pilot to get heavy and light xp for player kills. It would be so cool to build an alt entirely with PVP kills. --Side note -- Hey, why do you get 800 combat for killing an orun in a storm sector? It cheapens the combat earned thru PKS.

Convoys. Let the new pirate build his character by granting combat, heavy, and light XP for convoy bot kills. In addition, make a large percentage of the cargo dropped by killed transpots be goods used in Trade Guild Procurment missions. This would provide a fun alternative way to complete these bulk proc missions.

Radio communications with npc transports under attack should have an effect. For example: land one shot on a moth and hail "what is your cargo" and recieve an answer. Reduce him to 50% and hail "drop your cargo", and he drops 75%.

Ahoy Mates!

It wouldn't be so bad if Corvus sold weapons and *ships* to their pirates, but in order to get standing enough for decent guns, you need to do a whole bunch of trading? And no matter yer standing, you still need to get like, over half the usual license requirements to purchase ships from the Corvies.

Being a pirate is not the only way to get into fights. Just go to Sedina B8. Also, how many PKs do you actually have? Gaining lvls by pking is very slow.

One would think that merchants could tell the difference between stolen and valid goods.

I think you get such high combat points in storm sectors, because botting is slower in these areas, albeit safer for the pilot with radar extenders. Aside from the sheer fun of it, what else would be your incentive to eliminate the threat from these sectors?

Being a Pirate is a different experience.

Think about it before you go cause once you go over, there is no coming back.

Piracy is dead.

New Convoy Communication idea. Any attack on a npc convoy gets the sector response from the ship under attack saying, "Hey, I'm carrying 'x'; why not attack '*rasta hasta' instead? He's loaded with 'y'." Where 'y' is a more valuable cargo. This would be an authentic response from a moth driver trying to save his own skin.

A useful addon would be a cargo scanner.
Range 500 m
Target a ship and engage it, and get a list of the ships cargo.
Grid useage 2 - make it compatable with the widowmaker.